You can’t destroy or diminish Deep Ellum. It was here long before all of the shiny shopping malls, the overpriced corporate live music venues and trendy “red velvet rope” clubs with their snooty bottle service. As was referenced time and time again last night, the area is the cradle of this city’s creative sensibility.
If you’re content to live in a vacuous, benign existence with little sense of purpose or meaning, then stay at home and jerk off your X-Box.
If you wanna break out of a routine that offers little or no spiritual or creative inspiration, then know you will be embraced and made to feel part of this very eclectic creative community.
…There’s nothing to be afraid of.
– Jeffrey Liles via finelinelive.com (dead link)
I’m all for a little button-pushing, as anyone who knows me or reads this blog will know, yet I find myself scratching my head at the angry young man stuff coming from the D-town art crowd. I was totally down with the finger-pointing and looking-down-on, even just a few years ago. But now I consider all the things that have changed in even just the last half decade:
- Sociopolitically. Let’s face it, thinking about this category will send you into the fetal position. We don’t need to be reminded.
- Economically
- Technologically
- Generationally. Generation Xers are no longer the taste makers. And FIIK what the youngins are into these days
Technology is obviously the category that most interests me, as the Web has obliterated any and all forms of mediation that came before it. And yet, when someone blasts the web–or XBox–in their defense of old-school mediations like the stage or the gallery wall (And on myspace.com FFS! The irony!) …well, their dearth of logic is the source of some serious eye-rolling.
And it makes me not want to join that conversation. Me, the one who was a professional art advocate for years.
Lots more to say on this subject. This is just a placeholder.
I’m reminded of something I wrote in 2004:
We rail against suburbia, but it is not the enemy: it is only our version of the enemy.